Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Ya Know What Really Grinds My Gears?!?!

Nothing really, I just felt like making that the title of this little blog post. I have to say though, I'm kind of disappointing in the Google Wave phenomenon (do-doo-do-do-do). I mean, I was really excited about Wave when I first heard the announcement. I waited patiently for my invitation, and when I finally got it, I was ecstatic to be a part of the "e-mail revolution". I invited my friends, family, etc and a few of them joined in, but most of them never used it after that. I still have my Wave account and I still use it, but from what I understand, after a little over 2 years worth of development, Google is essentially scrapping the program. WHAT!? WHY!? Email is so antiquated and inefficient it's mind-boggling! I really think Google has a good thing going with Wave and that they should continue to develop it as a replacement for e-mail on a large scale. I think an advertising campaign al la iPod would do the trick since the world is apparently completely swept up by hype these days. But I digress.

They (Google) have released "Wave-in-a-Box" which is just a very basic Wave server setup that allows people to run their own wave servers sans the awesome Google gadgets, etc, but is that really enough? Google has cited "lack of interest" as reasons for slowing development. They are kind of leaving it to the community to dig in and make it whole.

Now, not to bash Linux (did ya catch the pun there?), because I LOVE Linux, but the lack of main stream popularity of Linux is due, at least in part, to the lack of real funded development. Granted there are TONS of flavors out there, but apart from the most recent Ubuntu flavor, which was targeted directly at PC newbies, Linux has stagnated in the market and will probably never be a viable OS for the general PC user. That, to me, is sad. Linux has such great potential to be a real Windows replacement OS. Maybe it's the general Linux community attitude that Linux is for geeks, by geeks and they don't, in some weird way, want Linux to be mainstream, but come on guys!

Anyway, the point is that Google Wave will end up going the way of Linux if they don't jump in and really nurture it into what it has great potential to be, and what we need to move forward in internet land. If anyone has the power to replace email, it's Google. So why are they stopping or at the very least, slowing WAY down?

That was more of a rant than I thought it would be. I told you, the thoughts of a G-Raff are random.